Earlier this week I started to see folks on Twitter share a conversation prompt that asked them to name four films they think they love more than anybody else.
While I’m sure most of the folks sharing this prompt didn’t actually believe they were the world’s foremost expert on the four films they were sharing, I’ve learned two things from a decade spent programming rep film screenings for a movie theater: A) People do often truly believe they are the world’s number one fan for certain movies and B) There is always somebody out there that loves a movie more than you.
When I was fifteen, I fell in love with movies. Before then, I liked movies just fine - but they weren’t on the top of my list of things to do on a given afternoon. Reading comics, playing outdoors, working on jigsaw puzzles, playing video games on my Sega Genesis, trying to find people who weren’t pedophiles to talk to about my favorite episodes on X-FILES chatrooms - just a handful of things I enjoyed doing more than watching movies.
But then 1999 happened.
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, FIGHT CLUB, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE MATRIX, and, yes, AMERICAN PIE all came out within months of each other. Watching these films opened a part of my brain that I didn’t previously know existed. Around that same time, my parents bought a DVD player and I would spend my weekends working my way through films I had rented at Blockbuster.
Throughout high school, I would go through cycles - alternating my obsession between certain titles. When I was in eighth grade, the anticipation for the SCREAM sequels is what sent me online for the first time - in search of rumors and casting news. There was the extended period that began my freshman year and lasted almost two decades in which I inhaled anything Kevin Smith-related. I could quote ARMY OF DARKNESS by memory when I was a sophomore. In my junior year, I became obsessed with SWINGERS to the point where I started dressing like Jon Favreau. DONNIE DARKO came out around my senior year and I acted like a Morman missionary - taking my DVD copy of the film to friend after friend and bullying them into watching it so I could then talk their ear off about all my theories surrounding Richard Kelly’s movie.
I spent hours watching behind-the-scene documentaries and listening to director’s commentaries. I recorded Joe Bob Briggs’ Monstervision specials on TNT on blank VHS tapes and would convince teachers to let me watch them in empty classrooms during my lunch break. For a public speaking class in JROTC, I did a Powerpoint presentation about the holy trilogy of cinema - Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. My love of movies often meant I was an annoying little shit about it.
I made movies my identity - but that’s because I felt like that was a corner of high school culture that I could carve out for my own. Nobody else in school talked about THE MONSTER SQUAD or owned a VHS tape of MALLRATS. Nobody downloaded movie scripts from Drew’s Script-O-Rama and then wasted their parent’s print cartridges printing them out and putting them into binders. I was my school’s resident movie geek and that gave me an identity - which all high school kids so desperately crave.
Here’s the thing I didn’t know back then, though - I was full of shit. Tons of other people in my high school were into the same movies I was into. Many probably had a better taste in films and a bigger knowledge than I did. I was deluded into thinking I was the school’s film expert, though, because I had nothing else to call my own as far as identities went. But I hadn’t come to that self-realization yet so, when I went to college, I ddin’t try to reinvent the wheel.
Within weeks of enrolling as a freshman at Texas A&M University, I applied to become a film critic for The Battalion, A&M’s student newspaper. The good news was there wasn’t much competition. I was able to review every new release that came out - but that wasn’t enough! I needed more if I was going to mark my territory in College Station when it came to who loves movies the most. I started reviewing older films under a column titled “Films That Time Forgot.” What movies did I review under this column, you might be asking yourself? Oh, just niche cinema nuggets like GOODFELLAS, RESERVOIR DOGS, and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. Stuff you’ve probably never heard of.
The fact that I was attending Texas A&M was both a blessing and a curse - I had zero competition for the role of resident film geek at The Battalion and that meant I was given a ton of great opportunities that I would have had to have fought tooth and nail for at another, more arts-inclined university. The lack of competition also meant that I never pushed my cinema spelunking to its limits. I was a surface-level cinephile passing himself off as some kind of would-be film professor. It was all so embarrassing in retrospect.
Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, it’s easy to see that you are never alone in your love for a particular title. It doesn’t matter how niche a title is - there’s a fandom for it that you can connect with. It’s very humbling to realize that your personal, formative obsessions were shared by hundreds and thousands of other dudes around the planet - most of which look an awful lot like you do. Black t-shirt wearing, bearded dudes unite. We are the true basic bitches of the world.
It was my film chutzpah, born in high school and nurtured in college, that led me to even have the balls to apply to be a film programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse when I was in my twenties. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never assumed I had what it took to take on such a role. But here’s the other thing I’ve learned from a decade-plus as a “film programmer” - having great knowledge of cinema is one of the least important parts of the job. Vastly more essential is a sense of curiosity - and that’s something that can’t be taught. I’ve worked with folks whose knowledge of films runs circles around my own, but they’ve built walls around the types of movies they deem are good and aren’t good and their tastes so often got in the way of successfully running a movie theater that made money and put butts in seats. It doesn’t matter how cool of a calendar you build, if nobody is coming to see what you picked you’ve failed as a film programmer.
I’ve learned enough by now to know that I am not a film expert. I’m not a critic, I’m not a historian, I don’t even like to call myself a curator. I love movies, though. I love watching movies, I love introducing movies to other people, and - most importantly - I love being introduced to new movies myself. I fell in love with movies when I was fifteen years old and that’s the kind of love that Paul Thomas Anderson makes problematic movies about.
PS - I also really still love ARMY OF DARKNESS. That movie rocks!